Poet of the Past: John Masefield
THIS timeless poem by John Masefield, which has prompted many of you to write in, will be remembered by many as one of the first poems they ever read or heard. Masefield’s simple and evocative writing has an inimitable resonance which creates not only indelible word pictures but also, like all good poetry, benefits from being read aloud. This helps secure Masefield’s place as one of the 20th century’s outstanding poets.
John Edward Masefield was born, the third of six children on 1 June, 1878, in the Herefordshire town of Ledbury where his father was a respected solicitor. His mother Caroline died in 1885 when he was six years old, after giving birth to his sister, Norah.
John, or Jack as he was always known to his family and friends, was initially educated at home and then at Warwick School where he was a boarder for three years. In the autumn of 1891, when Jack was thirteen, he left home to join the Merchant Navy’s training ship HMS Conway which was moored in the Mersey. Like other training ships at the time, it did not go to sea. After two years in the Conway, he was, by chance, put into a seamanship class under an instructor called “Wally” Blair who, he later said, was a “yarn spinner of the old dogwatch kind and who awoke in me afresh an ambition to be a teller of stories”.
In 1894 he joined the Gilcruix, a large fourmasted barque belonging to the White Star Line, loading in Cardiff for a voyage to Iquique, the nitrates port in Chile. This voyage brought him his first experience of sea-sickness and he recorded this feeling while sailing through extreme weather, including rounding Cape Horn, in his journal. He also wrote about his delight at seeing flying fish, porpoises and seabirds and being awed by the beauty of nature.
Masefield eventually returned to England, although a year later he went to sea again in a windjammer bound for New York City. His urge to become a writer and the difficulties he had encountered as a seafarer caught up with him and in New York he jumped ship before setting off to travel across the country.
For several months he lived as a vagrant, drifting between odd jobs before returning to New York and finding work in a bar. For the next two years, Jack was employed by the giant Alexander Smith carpet factory in Yonkers where the hours were long and working conditions grim. He continued to read voraciously and purchased up to twenty books a week.
In 1897 he returned home to England where he met his future wife, Constance de la Cherois Crommelin, of Huguenot descent, a graduate of Newnham College, Cambridge, and a teacher of mathematics at the girls’ public school, Roedean, near
Brighton. Despite their more than 20 year age difference it was a happy and long-lasting marriage and the couple had two children.
By the time he was 24, Masefield’s poems were becoming well-known in periodicals and his first collection of poetical works, Salt-Water Ballads, including Cargoes, was published in 1901. It also included his other much-loved sea poem, Sea Fever.
Although exempted from military service by age at the outbreak of WWI he volunteered to join the staff of a British hospital for French soldiers in Haute-Marne and served there as a hospital orderly, later publishing an account of his experiences. He was invited to visit the USA on a threemonth lecture tour to collect information on the mood of Americans regarding the war in Europe. It also led him to writing about the failure of Allied efforts in the Dardenelles which resulted in his book, Gallipoli.
Throughout the 1920s he became recognised as an accomplished writer of poetry, prose, plays and works of non-fiction as well as fantasies for children, such as The Box of Delights.
This culminated in 1930 by being appointed Poet Laureate by King George V. Jack’s last book, In Glad Thanksgiving, was published when he was eighty-eight years old. Shortly afterwards he developed a serious leg infection and died on 12 May 1967. He was cremated and his ashes placed in Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey.
The Times newspaper noted “. . . his poetry could touch to beauty the plain speech of everyday life’’. The expressive words of Cargoes
continue to tumble through our minds, as evocative now as when first written over one hundred years ago.